Category: SurrealGram

A year ago on a trip to NYC I had the chance to view a piece of art by Jason Salavon that averaged portraits together into one portrait. The results are uncanny. A portrait is so predictable that the shape of the objects and negative space of the painting are so obviously a portrait that even expressed as the average of several it still reads as a portrait. Its as though you took off your glasses and stood far enough away that the face simply became blurred. Salavon has similar works, such as the average of Every Playboy Centerfold, and 100 Special Moments. Kids with Santa is particularly cool:

Salavon’s work inspired me to create something similar.

Instagram receives thousands of photographs a day. They’re liked, and some become very popular. Enough so that they hit the ‘most popular’ page on Instagram. I asked, what does the average ‘most popular’ Instagram photo look like? I started by using my client key to download a group of them and average it up with ImageJ. I quickly realized that the most popular list changes. Frequently.

To truly capture what the average most popular photograph on instagram looks like it must be done realtime, at the request of the user and in the moment. I wanted to try some client-side image-processing with Javascript so I set out to create a beautiful time-waster that would allow a user to get the most recent popular photographs on instagram, choose a blend mode, and see the average photo right now. The result was Surrealgram:

Surrealgram uses my forks of some existing software, like Pixastic and connect-image-proxy, along with a jquery-mobile and backbone interface, with a super-slim node.js backend to handle proxied image requests (until Instagram supports CORS). Technology selection followed the sacred rule of “this is what I want to play with right now”. Using it is simple: